and had declared that every French victory was “a line of the constitutional charter."[74] The most reasonable explanation is that Bonaparte over-estimated the military strength of Austria, and undervalued the energy of the men of Milan, Modena, and Bologna, of whose levies he spoke most contemptuously.  Certain it is that he desired to disengage himself from their affairs so as to be free for the grander visions of oriental conquest that now haunted his imagination.  Whatever were his motives in signing the preliminaries at Leoben, he speedily found means for their modification in the ever-enlarging area of negotiable lands.

It is now time to return to the affairs of Venice.  For seven months the towns and villages of that republic had been a prey to pitiless warfare and systematic rapacity, a fate which the weak ruling oligarchy could neither avert nor avenge.  In the western cities, Bergamo and Brescia, whose interests and feelings linked them with Milan rather than Venice, the populace desired an alliance with the nascent republic on the west and a severance from the gloomy despotism of the Queen of the Adriatic.  Though glorious in her prime, she now governed with obscurantist methods inspired by fear of her weakness becoming manifest; and Bonaparte, tearing off the mask which hitherto had screened her dotage, left her despised by the more progressive of her own subjects.  Even before he first entered the Venetian territory, he set forth to the Directory the facilities for plunder and partition which it offered.  Referring to its reception of the Comte de Provence (the future Louis XVIII.) and the occupation of Peschiera by the Austrians, he wrote (June 6th, 1796): 

“If your plan is to extract five or six million francs from Venice, I have expressly prepared for you this sort of rupture with her....  If you have intentions more pronounced, I think that you ought to continue this subject of contention, instruct me as to your desires, and wait for the favourable opportunity, which I will seize according to circumstances, for we must not have everybody on our hands at the same time.”

The events which now transpired in Venetia gave him excuses for the projected partition.  The weariness felt by the Brescians and Bergamesques for Venetian rule had been artfully played on by the Jacobins of Milan and by the French Generals Kilmaine and Landrieux; and an effort made by the Venetian officials to repress the growing discontent brought about disturbances in which some men of the “Lombard legion” were killed.  The complicity of the French in the revolt is clearly established by the Milanese journals and by the fact that Landrieux forthwith accepted the command of the rebels at Bergamo and Brescia.[75] But while these cities espoused the Jacobin cause, most of the Venetian towns and all the peasantry remained faithful to the old Government.  It was clear that a conflict must ensue, even if Bonaparte and some of his generals had not secretly worked to bring